Chapter 8
When Ellie awakened the next morning, her first memory was of something thick and heavy between her legs, hanging there stiff and hard, the blood pulsing through it, through her, while that patch of wet hair and slippery skin between her legs swelled and stank with a musky odor.
She woke up afraid, remembering the events of the day before. When she recovered consciousness, she discovered that there was nothing seriously wrong with her, even though she was bruised everywhere - hips, legs, and breasts. Burt had evidently done everything to her but fuck her in the usual place, and that alone, was un-violated. Her buttocks hurt where he had hit her. She looked down and saw that her legs were covered with bruises, discolored, a deep purple in places.
Yesterday she had walked home very late. Her clothes were torn and she was crying, and she hadn't wanted anyone to see her in that condition. And then Cindy had come by. Ellie had put on a housecoat and tried to act normal, but Cindy, as if divining the reason for her agitation, had asked her about Burt Conroy. Ellie had denied everything. And that was where it stood.
But now, bruised and hurt, she almost wished that she had told Cindy what had happened. Burt would get away with this sort of thing until the day someone called the police down on him, or beat him thoroughly, the way he beat women. And yet Ellie realized that no jury would convict Burt Conroy without witnesses, and that she would subject herself to one indignity after another if she tried to take him to court.
It amounted to this: there was nothing she could do that would not destroy her reputation.
Besides, Burt had a kind of scary magnetism to him, a force that was stronger than Ellie, especially when Ellie had no one standing behind her. Somehow, when he told her to do something, she was unable to resist. The reason for this - Ellie couldn't conceal it from herself - was that her body was crying for sex. She needed sex, needed it like she had seldom needed anything. In the mornings she woke up steaming hot, moaning and tossing in her bed, finding the sheet beneath her dank and moist with her cream where it had run down her thighs. When she showered she found that her hands, as if on their own, wandered over her slippery breasts and down to her crotch where the soap foamed and slickened her vagina more than ever. In the evenings when she went to bed, she would lay under the covers and feel the need to be close to someone, to feel his arms around her, his body close to hers and - yes - his cock surging between her legs while she submitted and let him do anything he liked.
But it had to be gentle. That was the crux of the matter. It had to be a pleasant moment, a secure moment, not the kind of violent, destructive scene that Burt Conroy had lured her into. She was attracted and repelled, in other words. Laying there in her bed she envisioned his tumid cock thrust out over her, spurting out jism in a thick stream. There was something so powerful about the sight, so totally masculine. But her body was battered and bruised, and she was afraid, deathly afraid of the man who had beaten her.
It was impossible to live, she said to herself. She was determined not to let anything more happen to her, again, as she lay there in bed, feeling that familiar warmth between her legs, knowing that her thighs were growing sticky with cream even now, she made up her mind that she would leave the camp at the end of the week, even if she lost the money she had paid for her quarters. Until then she would stay in her room, sending for her meals and seeing no one, not even Cindy Wheeler.
The decision made her feel better. She got up and made herself some breakfast, not bothering to pull on a nightgown or a pair of panties. It no longer mattered whether she tried to remain chaste, whether she avoided evil thoughts; what had happened to her had robbed her of any vestige of maidenhood she might have had. And anyway, if her body was going to torment her like this - even making breakfast she felt those twinges in her vagina! - then she would no longer try to prevent it. Nor would she gratify it.
After she had eaten she decided to take a bath, rather than a shower; she had a long day ahead of her, a lot of time to fill out. Within a few minutes she was luxuriating in a hot bath.
The bathtub was overflowing with bubbles; underneath them, hidden from her sight, Ellie's hands cupped her breasts and felt the slickness of the soapy water. The sensation was a shivery one; Ellie squeezed her legs together in spite of herself, realizing full well that her thick cream was being exuded from her vagina to mix with the soapy water. But her body cried out for sex, for love, and she couldn't control herself at all.
When there was a knock on the door she didn't even hear it, nor would she have responded if she had. She lay there in the suds, feeling the warmth of the steaming water soaking through her body, and thought of sex, of men, of Burt Conroy, and Mike Taylor.
"How are you, sweetheart?"
The voice came directly from behind Ellie. It was sugary and complacent, and Ellie froze where she was. Then she spoke. "No! Please!"
"Just visiting, sweetheart. I won't hurt you."
"Burt - how did you get in?"
"Does it matter? I borrowed a key from the manager. Only he didn't know about it. And he won't know about it when I return it, either."
"Please don't hurt me - for God's sake, don't hurt me!"
She began to moan uncontrollably. He slapped her hard and she stopped.
"Burt - "
"Shut up! I've got something to tell you. We're having a little party tonight. Just a few people getting together and having a few beers. Liz will be there, Yvonne - "
"Burt - "
"I know, I know. But I had to do that yesterday, I love you, Ellie. Anyway, a few of us will be all together, you can ask Liz or Yvonne, either of them. And I want you there."
"No, Burt, I won't go, I won't!"
"Shut up! I'm telling you that you'll be there. Don't argue with me. I'm not asking you anything unreasonable. Anyway, Yvonne will be there, I told you that. And I wouldn't try to get out of it if I were you." His voice was suddenly threatening. Then he relaxed again. His voice became soft, persuasive. "Ellie, we just want you to learn to get along. To get along with other human beings. You're turning into a recluse; you're turning away from humanity, away from your own kind." He was very close to her now. "We want to help you. This evening will be the test. If you decide you want no part of us after tonight, that's fine; that's the way it is. But until then try to reserve judgment on us; try not to judge too harshly.
We're your friends, Ellie. Really we are."
She sank down deeper into the suds and didn't say anything. Burt stared at her. His black eyes seemed to glow. His face was set hard in an expression of grim determination that was at odds with his friendly words. Then he stepped back.
"I mean it, Ellie. I'll come and get you at eight o'clock. Eight o'clock sharp."
He turned and went out the door. "Oh, by the way," he said, turning around, "I'll be at the pool if you need me for anything. That's right outside where you can see me from your door. I'll be there all day."
After he left, Ellie sobbed and buried her face in her hands. That meant she could not even leave, and if she couldn't leave, and he had access to her cabin, then - But the thought broke off right there. In a curiously tranquil mood, as if resigned to her fate, helpless to act, she finished her bath and dried herself off. She would not think about anything.
"Talk to her," Cindy Wheeler was saying. "Things can always be worked out if people only talk to each other. That's all that's required. Really, Mike."
"What do I talk about? Do I ask about Burt Conroy? Do I ask how it feels to be beaten - you know as well as I do how Burt gets his kicks. He's not going to change, not for Ellie or anyone else."
"Talk to her. That's all I ask. We'll see her together."
They were coming through the camp. After their tryst up at the lake, both of them had been subdued coming down the trail, but as they reached the camp their normal spirits returned - at least Cindy's did. She was in a way sorry that she had been unable to resist Mike - had wanted to save him for Ellie, her friend - but sex was a matter of little moment to Cindy. It was just a way of getting close to people, of having fun with your body. It was a physical need, like the need some people have for alcohol or for cigarettes. In Cindy's case, it was sex that she needed. She was a lovely girl, but beneath all her poise, all her casual charm, she was a lusty wench indeed, and when a good-looking man like Mike Taylor made a move toward her she turned liquid - at least in one place - and gave him what he wanted.
As for Mike, his thoughts were all in a jumble.
He was a fair man basically and realized that he couldn't expect of Ellie what he didn't require of himself. But it was not the same, it really wasn't. He liked sex and needed it, like any healthy man, but Burt Conroy used sex as a means of dominating and destroying other people, and Mike was aware that the women Burt was successful with were, for the most part, guilt-ridden, neurotic. women whose sexual activity was a frenzied search for a kind of abasement that proved to them that they were what they had suspected themselves of being. It was a circular thing, they came to Conroy because they hated themselves, and by doing his bidding proved to themselves that they were deserving of hate. In Mike's experience, the women who sported with Conroy up at the pool on Spindler Creek - with the exception of Yvonne - were a self-pitying, bitchy lot. Yvonne was merely highly sexed - a nymphomaniac, really - and otherwise normal. But Ellie - Ellie was another thing. If she was with Burt - He stopped thinking about it. They were in the camp, and all around them were the pleasant redwood cottages in which the inhabitants lived. There were no children in the camp - only a couple of vastly experienced thirteen-year-olds who had arrived with their widowed mother - and there were no old people. In the dusk they could see the pool, where a few people still lazed about. Doc Reynolds was there, listening to the life story of a young and sweetly nubile girl, while sipping from yet another martini. The girl was leaning toward him, exposing large breasts, the nipples of which had popped out of the halter, and Doc Reynolds was watching them gravely.
Then they saw him. Burt Conroy came out of Ellie's cabin, looked around, and padded on over to the pool, walking with that peculiarly self-conscious shuffle that he had.
Cindy turned and looked at Mike. "No, Mike," she said, grabbing at his arm. "I won't let you. You're going with me, right this minute. And we're going to talk to Ellie."
"About what?" he muttered. But even he was eager to talk to her now, to find out once and for all what was happening with her - what kind of a girl she really was.
The door was closed, the curtains drawn, when they reached Ellie's cabin. Across the way from it, in the cabin where Shirley Wilson had lived, Claude Branch lived now, and he was seated in front of the cabin, on a bench, staring owlishly across toward the pool, where Burt Conroy had just sat down in one of the deck chairs.
They knocked on the door. There was no answer, and Cindy knocked again, harder.
"She's always doing this. She's - " The door opened, just a crack. Cindy tried to push it the rest of the way and discovered that a chair was pushed up against the door handle.
"Go away, please. Just go - "
"Ellie? It's me, Cindy."
Ellie's face appeared in the crack of the door. "I'll talk to you another time, Cindy. I just - I just want to be alone." She reached across the crack of the door and grabbed a nightgown off a table. In that moment Cindy saw that Ellie was naked; her bare breast was visible just for a moment in the dusk. She stepped in front of the crack, but even as she did so she realized that Mike, too, had seen what she had seen, and that he had drawn the same conclusions.
Mike was already walking away, fast. He didn't know where he would go, what he would do, but he knew that he had to leave. All his hopes were crushed, all his desires thwarted.
He felt as if he were going to cry, and squeezed his hands together in anger at himself.
God, what a fool I've been, he said to himself. One of his workers at the factory, a gnarled, ancient carpenter who was an expert at adjusting the whirling blades of the lathes, was fond of saying to Mike, "Mike, a cunt's a cunt. They've all got a certain dirtiness in their disposition, a certain bitchiness. And the worst of it is, you can hate them, you can despise them, you can kick them around - but you can't do. without them." He said this with a certain satisfaction, as if pleased that the world was demonstrably as evil and foul as his own disposition. Until now Mike had just laughed off his words. The old man had been bitterly disappointed by women; it was natural that he should distrust them. Yet - yet how could one account for Ellie? His instincts had told him that she was pure, that she was lovely. How could it be otherwise?
He walked faster and faster, blindly, not looking where he was going. When he felt a tap on the shoulder, he jumped around with a movement so abrupt that it startled the dark girl who had touched him.
"Go for a little walk?" said Yvonne. Her plump breasts bulged up out of the slinky dress she wore, and her fingers played about her belly, pointing toward a lush, tropical forest, dank and steaming, that was suddenly the most important place in the world to Mike.
Shortly afterward, they were in a deep ravine not far from the camp. Yvonne was standing in front of him, her hands cupping her breasts. With a sudden movement she pushed upward on them and they popped out of the dress, quivering and wobbling in the deep dusk. There was little light anymore, but night was Yvonne's natural element. She was like a cat, prowling late at night, sleeping by day - she even screwed like a cat, with a clawing, fiery excitement that left its mark, usually in the form of deep scratches, on her partners.
But for the moment she was in no hurry. She had taken control, knew she had Mike where she wanted him, and would not let him go until she had drained him, until she was through with him and could discard him the way she discarded all men when they no longer fulfilled her sexual needs.
Mike stood up. It was as if he were a puppet, being controlled by strings, without a will of his own. He reached out to touch Yvonne's breasts, and she let him, smiling that dark smile, her dusky South American womanliness a heavy presence in the ravine. In the cool night air Mike could smell the pines of the forest, hear the sounds of animals out there. He could smell Yvonne, who let him bury his head between her breasts. Smelling them, smelling the perfume, the musky odor of a woman's sweat, he found himself becoming aroused to an incredible pitch.
Yvonne was fumbling with her dress, unzipping it in back. It was a glittering silver-lame dress, an evening dress, really, and Mike wondered why Yvonne was wearing such a dress at the camp. But it was overwhelmingly sexy and he reached around behind her to help her take it off.
When the zipper was free, Yvonne shrugged and the top of the dress tumbled. down to her hips, which wedged securely in the tight dress, and Mike pulled at the dress to remove it. Underneath the dress was nothing but bare skin; no panties, no stockings, nothing at all but the great, black bush that was Yvonne's pubic hair. A musky scent rose from it; Mike knew of the dank, slippery patch of distended flesh and dripping hair beneath that dark blotch. He reached his hand down, let his finger slide into the hair, then let it slide farther down until it was touching her startlingly large clitoris which was popped out of its sheath.
Fully a half inch of it was out and he massaged it lightly with his slick finger, feeling the way her body trembled and shuddered with each movement. Then he let his finger explore, rimming the fat, sugary lips of her vagina, feeling the slickness there, the rich and sweet juice that her vagina exuded, while she shifted her feet and let her legs part.
When she pushed gently at his head, he let himself be guided by her, let her shove his head between her legs, until his face was full up against her crotch and the dripping hair was curling over his mouth. He opened his mouth, letting his tongue explore. In a curious way her emissions were both sweet and salty, and they stimulated him until it was painful, until his cock, distended and pulsating, felt as if it must burst from the pressure.
Then he pushed at her, making her tumble to the ground. He sucked eagerly at her cunt, licking it clean, but at the same time her emissions increased until her whole vagina was flooded with them and they were running down her leg to the sand beneath her. Mike came up on her then, scrambling frantically, feeling that his cock was bursting now, aware that he was ready to come.
He let his cock slide into her, and her capacious vagina, the lips slick and full, flushed with blood, accepted him easily. Within a moment he had come; the jism spurted out, a sticky and thick secretion that formed in clotted balls and burst forth from him, deep into her, until it seemed as if she herself must burst from its entry.
Gasping, he jerked spasmodically and spurted the last few drops of jism into her, while Yvonne closed her eyes and forced herself to come.
It was awesome, the way she reached her climax. She clutched him with legs and arms both while biting into his shoulder - squeezed him so hard that he could not have gotten away from her if he had wanted to. Her whole body shuddered in a spasm of ecstasy while her face - screwed up as if in pain - showed the effects of the exquisite sensation that was bursting through her body in waves. Out of control, dizzy from the sensation, she bit down hard on Mike's shoulder while her cunt squeezed down with incredible force on his cock.
Mike winced. But the sensation was so intense, the sight of her ecstatic climax so .stimulating that he almost came again and would have if he hadn't forced himself not to.
For a minute or two it still went on. Yvonne was unaware of him, unaware of anything but the intense, rhythmic flashes that burst through her groin, ebbing and flowing like the tides. Mike felt as if his cock must be squashed, so tight was her cunt, and he felt a brief moment of surprise that she could do this to him, even though her cunt was abnormally large.
He drew away from her, not wanting to come again so soon.
"Oh, God, don't - please put it back in!" She gasped, still in convulsions from her orgasm.
"Put in your hand!" she said then.
Mike almost laughed, but he put his hand up against her cunt. The rhythmic clutching and loosening of her cunt went on; he could feel the tremors from it. But to his astonishment, during one of the slack moments, his hand did indeed slip into her cunt, the four fingers, side by side, gliding easily into the large, warm crevice. Then, in another of those rhythmic contractions, her cunt squeezed down on his hand until his fingers came together from the pressure. He made a fist and discovered that, by waiting for the right moment, he could get his whole fist into her. The pressure was intolerable. Her cunt came down in one final squeeze; he couldn't move his hand at all, either forward or back, but had to leave it there, tight within her body.
Then it was suddenly over. Yvonne lay there, gasping and laughing, surprised at herself. "I think you discovered something there, Mike. Now all my lovers are going to have to make a fist."
"Even that Great Dane?" he asked wryly.
"It was a Newfoundland," she answered with a demure smile. "And anyway he's got other talents. He does it fast - bang bang bang - so fast that I can hardly keep up with him. And he doesn't get tired. But you needn't worry, I washed since I did it with him last."
"Thanks,", ,said- Mike?
"Sure," she said. "I'd do it any time with you, Mike, you're real good. Maybe tomorrow? But I got to go now, I'm late."
"Late to what?"
"Spindler Creek. This is the big night. Burt has promised us something good, and I said I'd be there. I'm one of the attractions."
"You are? Doing what?"
She hesitated. "Mike, you won't be mad?"
"Why should I be mad?"
"I mean about what I'm going to do. It wouldn't affect anything, would it? I mean, you'd still do it with me once in a while."
"Sure. I mean, I guess so. But what the hell are you going to do up there, for Christ's sake?"
"Mike," she said, leaning over toward him. He could smell her breath and the musky odor of her sweat. Her eyes gleamed and she had a pleased smile on her face. "Mike, I'm going to do something sensational. I'm going to fuck a goat."